Lord Banshee- Fugitive

by Russell O Redman

  “The personality you have right now was built out of all the things that happened to you up to now, mixed with the choices you made internally, and genetic predispositions that you inherited. Your other personae are like snapshots of your personality as it existed in some period in the past, and each snapshot was built from everything that happened to you externally and internally before that time.

  “In your case, your personae have been divided into eight snapshots. Imagine that the first snapshot captured your personality at the age of five. What that means is that they activated a set of control points in your brain that were important at the age of five, so you will make the same kinds of decisions you did then. It is never perfect. Neurons die or form new synapses as you learn new things, so you do not get your true personality at the age of five, but only what you remember your personality to have been, if you catch the distinction. Also, the number of control points they could identify is at most a small subset of those that were active at that age. Your memory is much better than most people’s, but the stored snapshot can provide only a hazy approximation of who were at that time.

  “I have removed the temporary snapshot that I created because I now believe it is dangerous, so you have eight such snapshots, seven from your earlier life and a current one that collects everything that has happened since you were broken. That last entry, the one that you reset to on a trauma, is not really a snapshot at all. It is your real personality.

  “Beware, I am being more talkative than usual because I am not sure about my conclusions. I need to know whether any of this matches your experience. I have never met anyone like you while ze was alive. Remember the other agents who had the torture immunity? I believe all of them had been broken in the same way to prevent them from becoming too independent until they were through their training. I was allowed to copy the code from two of them post-mortem but could never experiment with it or watch how it behaved as they underwent different experiences.

  “I am very much a hands-on, hardware kind of guy, so observing a live system often tells me as much as the code itself. I have my own set of personae, like the daft fixit fool who travels the TDF fleet repairing things. I have learned far more about how missiles perform in battle by talking to the weps and engs in the fleet than by reading any number of spec sheets.

  “I am intrigued by what you people did with tokens and emojis to capture the pirates. I will have to interview every marine and sailor who participated when we get to the Moon. Fascinating!

  “Anyways, I have compared the code from the two dead agents with what is in your unit. I know the changes I made, and I know how the code looked after you made your changes, but the two dead agents presumably tell me what the code would have looked like when it was new.

  “Most of their code was a mishmash of different coding standards, naming conventions, and paradigms, welded together with ghastly logical jumps. The persona code in the dead agents was clean, much better than the rest. Cleaner than the changes I made. They clearly put all their art and probably their best programmer into making that code work, instead of just bashing out something that was good enough for the moment. I suspect that each of the mission blocks was written by a single person, so the missions are probably also clean, even if they all follow different standards.

  “The persona code cycled through the personae every few hours until the reset was hit, after which it stopped cycling and sat in the most recent of the persona they had created. The real one. As originally written, it was nearly fool proof, although there is the old warning that nothing is damn-fool proof.

  “So, this is what I think happened. They broke all of you so that you could not trust your own judgement. Your decisions while you were cycling varied randomly depending upon which persona was active at the time. You would, of necessity, come to rely on their judgement in preference to your own. During a training session, they would reset you to the real persona, the one that could still learn new things. They would restart the cycle when the session was over. When it was time to send you on a mission, they would stop the cycle and activate the detailed instructions for what you were to accomplish. The other agents died trying to complete tasks that were impossible precisely because they did not take sufficient care to preserve their own lives. All but you.

  “You were different. You edited your persona control system while they were making their changes. I doubt they ever realized that you had participated in the editing sessions. It was a reckless thing to do and should have killed you, but it did not. Instead, it made you so unstable that even they could not control you, because you could not stay reliably in your most recent, real persona. The training they intended never occurred. About the same time, half of that team of popping heads disappeared, reassigned to an even more secret project as best I could tell, so the rest of the team wrote you off and handed you over to the regular psychs. They did what they could to rehabilitate you and released you to become who you are today. You are now someone completely different from who they had originally intended and have even achieved a kind of coexistence with your multiple persona, at least until the shocks of the last couple of weeks.

  “Does any of this make sense? Does it match what you remember of that time?”

  I, as the Ghost, remembered that time as a haze with no clear points of reference. It had all happened after I stopped being the Ghost. I passed control to the Cripple. If Alexander was right, the Cripple might have more ‘control points’ to hook into that time.

  Breaking? Training? Editing! Cycling? Disappearance...

  Alexander, “Wait! Be careful! The monitor is showing irregular activity. Have you remembered something? Do not tell me what it is! I am pretty sure I do not want to know. But does it help make sense of your behaviour?”

  It did. With his explanation as a trigger, I remembered the breaking and the edits I had made so inexpertly. I remembered bits and pieces from the days after I had been broken, while I cycled rapidly through my personae in an uncontrollable jumble. I remembered, barely, adding the extermination of my treacherous psychs to the Mission, killing all of them I could find and disposing of the bodies. I remembered the moments when I passed control to the Assassin for the kill.

  I remember deliberately suppressing those memories, except for the sense that I had to discourage anyone from investigating the disappearances. The TDF would have executed me for the murders, and my real Mission would have failed.

  I switched back to being the Ghost and thought about the implications.

  If I had not attempted to edit my list of personae, I would have been trained and sent on one of their missions. I would either have failed and died, or I would have succeeded and exterminated everyone on Mars. If I died, the current war would still be happening and I would not be here to stop it. All of humanity would die. If I had succeeded, Mars would have died, but as Begum had noticed, the real threat lurked out in the Belt where the major factions had their fortresses. Without Mars as a focus for their attention, the factions would have turned their wrath against the Earth, and everyone would still die.

  If I had been made my edits successfully, I would have been predictable. I had tried to kill all my psychs, but it is hard to destroy a powerful conspiracy. Although I might have escaped their clutches temporarily, I would eventually have been caught. I might have been assassinated, but more likely I would have been forced back into their program. Either way, humanity would have died.

  My continued existence, and the only hope I could see for our future, had hinged in that moment on my being an incompetent programmer.

  Even over the comm, it was hard to talk while I dealt with that possibility. I managed to croak out, “Yes.” The longer I thought, the more I realized that the concept was mind blowing, but probably false. Humility was not a virtue the Ghost had cultivated but faced with such an imponderable in the distant past, humility might help me get back to work. The human species would have done other things and the current war would be playing out quite diff
erently, possibly worse but also possibly much better. It did not matter since we were here now and I had to deal with that.

  Following the line of thought Alexander had triggered, memory management had been one of the earliest lessons the Exterminators had taught me. We operated entirely outside Terrestrial law, in defiance of all legitimate authority. I remembered in detail what I had done to suppress memories, so that I could lie convincingly to outsiders about what I was doing. And, I remembered how to revive those memories when I needed them.

  I enabled both the Ghost and the Cripple and examined the hideously raw memories of the three days that Toyami and Alexander had suppressed, which fortunately were still too hazy to disable my reason. I remembered the moments when I had loved Leilani so intensely I could no longer let her go, and I squashed those memories out of my mind. The love remained, but not that conclusion.

  They had taught me how to dredge my training dreams back into conscious memory, because I was supposed to analyze and learn from those dreams. Gingerly, cautiously, I re-examined the nightmares that had driven us to the brink of destruction. I felt again the despair of watching humanity die, over and over, but I squashed the memory of those emotions, leaving a bland record of the events in the dreams.

  As I thought my way through those three days, I slowly realized that the Cripple had come to care too much about the whole team to let them go, as I knew I must. I had wanted to become a whole person again in the belief that I would be a better agent, but in fact I could not complete the Mission as the Cripple. The Ghost knew the Plan and only he had the detachment needed to follow it, so I switched back to the Ghost. There was much still to think about, but Alexander had been talking again and I had not listened to a single word.

  Me/local, “Pardon? If I understand you, just being my most recent persona is already sufficient to be a fully integrated person again, except that person has been trained in a way that makes me useless for the original set of missions? What I thought of as a crippling disability was just a side effect of being broken and might heal in time now that I am stable again?”

  Alexander/local, “What? Oh, basically yes, that is probably true. Except I believe that the exterminators are still active somewhere and may try to activate you, just to see if you can still complete one of their missions. They do not care if you live or die, so long as you create trouble.

  “What I was saying is that activating several of your personae at the same time changes the weights you assign to each persona. Having the first and last personae active means that the first is assigned double its fair share, because you still remember that time in your life through the last persona. I had originally thought that integrating your personae meant that all of them would be active at once, but that would give excessive weight to your earliest life, tapering off until your most recent persona would have almost no weight at all. I am quite sure that is not what you were hoping to achieve.”

  Another brick clicked into place along the Path. When I needed to adjust the Mission, I could enable the Cripple, whose judgement on such things I trusted. I had already done it a few times with good results. For all his compassion, the Cripple was perfectly capable of rational thought. If necessary, I could assist the Cripple by enabling both of us together. That would be useful whenever it was necessary to identify and edit the most damaging parts of our memories. The rest of the time I should remain the Ghost, who alone could maintain the focus and detachment needed to follow the Path. I was stable in both personae and could not think of any reason I might need the others.

  Alexander/local, “So, we are fairly sure that your default, most recent, persona is the real one that implements your so-called ‘integrated person’ now that it is stable. I am reasonably confident, but not certain, that we have disabled the exterminator’s ability to activate their suicide missions. I have your word that you will not allow yourself to be tortured to death just because you know they cannot extract secrets that way. Are you absolutely sure you want the torture immunity to be permanent? I note that you have been editing your memories, which I find very disturbing.”

  Me/local, “I edited my memories to suppress the most traumatic moments from the three days that you and Doctor Toyami suppressed. Those days were filled with intense emotion that caused dangerously irresponsible behaviour, so I strongly prefer to remember them like a book I read, rather than as a searing part of my personal life.

  “The only circumstances under which I will permit myself to die under torture are those that I cannot avoid, so they do not concern me. Yes, I unquestionably want the torture immunity to be permanent, if only so I do not develop an aversion to all the surgery I am likely to endure.”

  That satisfied Alexander, so we made the small changes necessary to fix the torture immunity permanently. It would take a complete reprogramming of the old monitor to remove that capability, and only the most skilled and observant doctors and psychologists would even realize that an older monitor was hidden behind the new one.

  2357-03-13 07:00

  Rescue from Valhalla

  Alexander mentioned that he would be transferring to the Hai Ba Tru’ng when they arrived and had nothing to do between now and then. Normally, when he went tripping with the TDF he brought a long list of updates and tests, as well as work in progress that he could use to fill his time. His rescue had been so abrupt that he had only been able to bring a handful of updates, which he had already either installed or passed to the crew.

  I commented that this would be like an extended vacation, to which he snorted that a vacation from having fun was one he would avoid by preference.

  We spoke for a while about the kinds of weapons Leilani and I had been tracking, mostly small arms and anti-personnel explosives that had no legitimate use in a mining economy. We had often found other, even darker, components mixed with the small arms. Poisonous gases not needed for any industries known to be active on Mars. Viral distribution systems used for veterinary medicine, useless in the Belt, which had no animals, and therefore most likely intended as a bioweapon. Targeting systems for advanced missiles. We had never been too concerned because they were never complete, operational systems. We had believed that the major factions on Mars were purchasing these components out of pride without understanding what was required to maintain and use them. Normally, we just passed the cases to other branches of the government that had jurisdiction over such systems.

  Now I wondered whether some, or even most, of the small arms were going to the clans out in the Belt. The attempt to steal a whole crew of workers for a pharmaceutical farm suggested that the clans might be more sophisticated than we had thought and were actively trying to build the more advanced facilities. Were these efforts being organized by the major factions, by independent entrepreneurs hoping for a better life, or by clans locked in a desperate battle for survival? Were the components being purchased for display, or were they templates that would be used to create thousands of copies, perhaps intended for entirely different systems? We had no answers, just more and more questions.

  Trying to lighten the mood and at the same time to learn more about how this man worked, I asked how the extraction from Valhalla had been handled. He suggested we invite Raul into the conversation to get both sides of the story, since he was also puzzled by some parts of what had happened.

  I pinged Raul to see if he was awake, only to find that the whole team was awake, waiting for the arrival of the Hai Ba Tru’ng and the Quetzalcoatl. Toyami had argued long and hard that she had to come with me to the Quetzalcoatl to oversee my recovery, but Sergei had rejected the suggestion absolutely and insisted that she had to care for Leilani. He had observed (loudly) that MacFinn was a skilled surgeon and as an LR ship the Quetzalcoatl had one of the best hospital facilities in near-Earth space. Toyami responded that it was also the oldest LR ship and nearing retirement. Sergei replied with the suggestion that she was unwilling to let go of her hero, which hit too close to home in several different ways. Leilani had rea
cted as a jilted wife in the presence of a new mistress. Toyami had protested unconvincingly that she was concerned only for my recovery. Raul had attempted to intervene but had been assailed from all sides for interfering. The result was that everyone was awake and in a bad temper. Or, at least, that is what I deduced from the chorus of accusations and complaints that came back from my attempt to open the discussion.

  Alexander/private, “I do not think they are aware I am part of the conversation. This illustrates why I never ask to manage a team. Too much drama. I was never any good at dispute resolution.”

  To Alexander/private, “Wise man. I think I need a little private time with my colleagues, please.”

  To Leilani/private, “My Love, I am afraid to touch you lest I fail again, but you must know you are the only hope and dream I cherish. Please forgive Doctor Toyami, who is far more afraid of the future than I am. She needs your strength, wisdom and guidance to face the trials that are coming. I fear that Doctor Toyami sees me as a father figure and you as her surrogate mother. Please be gentle, because we need her as a friend and colleague. Please tell Sergei not to be so direct. He means well but does not always consider how others will react to his insights. And Raul has no experience as a mediator. Train him, because he wants to help.”

  To Toyami/private, “Doctor, I will be well and in good company, but the rest of the team needs your skill and patience. Leilani understands me better than anyone else, sometimes better than I understand myself. If you wonder what I might do in any given circumstance, ask her and she can probably tell you. For the same reason, Leilani is desperately afraid and needs your wisdom and guidance as she struggles to accept what must happen. Please forgive Sergei. He was rude, but that reveals the depth of his concern. Bring him reassurance. Raul is not Katerina and was hurt when everyone rejected his attempt to help. He was right to try. While I am away, I will be depending upon you to keep everyone together. We are being torn apart by the violence of our emotions, which you as a psychiatrist will understand. If ever you wondered whether we needed you, today shows how essential you are as our team Doctor.”